CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributions

Contributions are welcome in the form of feedback and discussion in issues, or pull requests for changes to the code.

Once the implementation of a piece of functionality is considered to be bug free and properly documented (both API docs and an example script), it can be incorporated into the main branch.

To help developing mne-bids, you will need a few adjustments to your installation as shown below.

Before submitting a pull request, we recommend that you run all style checks and the test suite, and build the documentation locally on your machine. That way, you can fix errors with your changes before submitting something for review.

All contributions are expected to follow the Code of Conduct of the mne-tools GitHub organization.

Setting up a development environment

To start with, you should install mne-bids as described in our installation documentation. For a development environment we recommend that you perform the installation in a dedicated Python environment, for example using conda. Afterwards, a few additional steps need to be performed. For all of the steps below we assume that you work in your dedicated mne-bids Python environment.

Clone MNE-Python and install it from the git repository

Use git clone to obtain the MNE-Python repository from https://github.com/mne-tools/mne-python/, then navigate to the cloned repository using the cd command.

Then from the mne-python root directory call:

pip uninstall mne
pip install -e .

This will uninstall the current MNE-Python installation and instead install the MNE-Python development version, including access to several internal test files that are needed for mne-bids as well.

Install the development version of MNE-BIDS

Now fork the mne-bids repository. Then, git clone your fork and install it in "editable" mode.

git clone https://github.com/<your-GitHub-username>/mne-bids
pip install -e ./mne-bids

You should now have both the mne and mne-bids development versions available in your Python environment.

Install additional Python packages required for development

Navigate to the root of the mne-bids repository and call:

pip install -r test_requirements.txt
pip install -r doc/requirements.txt

This will install several packages to run tests, and build the documentation for mne-bids.

Install the BIDS validator

For a complete development setup of mne-bids, it is necessary to install the BIDS validator. The outputs of mne-bids are run through the BIDS validator to check if the conversion worked properly and produced datasets conform to the BIDS specification.

To install the stable version of bids-validator, please follow the instructions in the bids-validator README. You will need the "command line version" of the bids-validator.

To install the development version of bids-validator, see the contributor documentation of bids-validator.

In brief, the most convenient installation can be done using conda. In your conda development environment for mne-bids simply call:

conda install -c conda-forge nodejs
npm install --global npm@^7
npm install --global bids-validator

This would install the stable bids-validator and make it globally available on your system.

Check your installation by running:

bids-validator --version

Install GNU Make

We use GNU Make for developing mne-bids. We recommend that you install GNU Make and make use of our Makefile at the root of the repository. For most Linux and OSX operating systems, GNU Make will be already installed by default. Windows users can download the Chocolatey package manager and install GNU Make from their repository.

If for some reason you can't install GNU Make, it might suffice to inspect the Makefile and to figure out how to run the commands without invoking make.

Making style checks

We run several style checks on mne-bids. If you have accurately followed the steps to setup your mne-bids development version, you can simply call from the root of the mne-bids repository:

make pep

Running tests

We run tests using pytest. If you have accurately followed the steps to setup your mne-bids development version, you can simply call from the root of the mne-bids repository:

make test

If you have installed the bids-validator on a per-user basis (that is, not globally), set the environment variable VALIDATOR_EXECUTABLE to point to the path of the bids-validator before invoking pytest:

VALIDATOR_EXECUTABLE=../bids-validator/bids-validator/bin/bids-validator pytest

Building the documentation

The documentation can be built using Sphinx. If you have accurately followed the steps to setup your mne-bids development version, you can simply call from the root of the mne-bids repository:

make build-doc

or, if you don't want to run the examples to build the documentation:

make -C doc/ html-noplot

The latter command will result in a faster build but produce no plots in the examples.

More information on our documentation setup can be found in our mne-bids WIKI.

Making a release

Usually only core developers make a release after consensus has been reached. There is dedicated documentation for this in our mne-bids WIKI.